Witcher Dev Notes #2

Witcher Dev Notes #2: A Sea of Content

When we sat down to plan out the Witcher PNP RPG I wanted to put EVERYTHING in. If it was in the franchise I wanted it in the RPG. As we’ve continued to put the RPG together I have learned a hard lesson. Not everything can be crammed into one book and sometimes you don’t want to cram everything into one book.

When I first began working on the RPG it was before Witcher 3 had been announced and I had just finished playing Witcher 2. I began incorporating everything I could find. I got a ton of content into the first draft of the book. It was then that I started reading the original Witcher series by Andrzej Sapkowski and started truly discovering the depth of the franchise. Instead of writing an RPG based on 2 video games I was writing an RPG based on 2 video games, an entire book series and a comic series. Suddenly it was no longer just Humans, Elves, Dwarves and Witchers! We had Gnomes, Halflings, Lizardmen & Beaver people… Tons of history opened up and really cool characters were discovered! And then Witcher 3 was announced and another flood of content came washing over us! Changes to the map, new locations, new monsters, new gear!

But it all meant one thing. Not everything could be done in the core book for the Witcher RPG. I was told by my boss that the book had a limit and not everything could be put in. Later, when we did expansions and supplements for the RPG we could go indepth on certain subjects, but for now the core book needed to have the things people would need to run a campaign in the Witcher World. As I’ve begun to cut things back I’ve realized that it’s better this way. The Witcher world is rich with lore and background and if I tried to cram everything into one book I would have a book 3 feet thick that would cost and arm and a leg and be overwhelming for anyone who wasn’t already a fan of the Witcher. In the core book for the Witcher RPG you will have:

A basic background of the Witcher world with a section on what it’s like in between Witcher 2 and Witcher 3, (which is the official setting of the Witcher PNP RPG)

Character creation information for the most prevalent races and professions

A moderate number of weapons, armor and bits of gear from the Witcher video games

A moderate bestiary with at least one representation of all of the monster types in Witcher 3

Stats for many of the major characters in Witcher 3

And a list of relic weapons and armor to find on your adventures with a description of their legends.

Unfortunately, with the core book for the Witcher PNP RPG we won’t be giving information on many of the plot points in the Witcher video games. This is because we want to make sure that when we do we can devote the proper amount of time and space to them. We would rather wait and do an indepth supplement on, say for instance, the Wild Hunt, than write a few lines about them in the back of the core book and leave it at that.

In the end we want to make sure that everything that goes into this book feels important and gets it’s full due. Trust me, anything we don’t cover in the core book will be in later supplements. I love this world far too much to let anything fall by the way side.